Team News

The Love of Tools: Get Your Business in Line with Atlassian Cloud

For the love of tools

toolsAsk any craft person about their favorite tools and you will almost without exception enjoy an interesting conversation that provides a very personal view of how people think about and do their work. What makes one tool more valuable than the others? Why are the handles of one or two tools more polished with use?

Software tools are maybe a little more of an esoteric topic. But doing what we do, we need them, and we use them every day. Atlassian Cloud is one of our very favorites. It is certainly our most used. At any given time during the workday, there is at least two or three of the Atlassian products in use by different members of our crew.

We really like it – it’s versatile, flexible, and, with some application and discipline, it can add a lot of efficiency to the process of running technical projects and building software. Especially if your team is using Agile methods.

The Atlassian Cloud

It's like magic

Initially, we started by simply using JIRA to create and assign tasks to our developers. We plugged Tempo in so that we could track time. Eventually, we started using Confluence. It started as a way for our solution architect to write up technical descriptions of JIRA tasks for our developers, but we soon moved into making Confluence the central hub of a project. Each project now has a main page, with various macros that show issues, progress and any other key stats and performance indicators we want to track.

Confluence is super easy to use and allows for better team collaboration. Threaded comments make it easy to track discussions related to particular issues or tasks. We love using the Gliffy plugin to create attractive and easy to understand diagrams. We’ve recently begun to create Confluence spaces for clients in order to provide constantly up-to-date documentation and FAQ for the products that we’ve developed for them.  We’ve also integrated issue tracking capabilities directly into our software so our developers and testers share a common means of logging and following the status of issues with our customers; software users can log issues directly from a product UI and they are automagically added to the tracking system together with relevant action and exception details.

Atlassian helps us be better at Agile

Much of our development work is informed by the principles of %28software_development%29” target=”_blank”>product backlog and to assign the constituent items into sprints, epics, versions and so on.  The tools are presented with a pleasingly intuitive logic – lots of drag and drop gestures, highlight/click and there you have the actions you would hope for.

Our development team uses Bitbucket as a code repository. Every code check-in can be tracked to a JIRA issue. Code check-ins cause an auto-build of an application, so that once a developer submits their work, our testers will get a status notification and will know specifically what’s ready for them to start testing. If the code tests fine, our tester can then close that issue in JIRA. If they find a bug, they can quickly re-open that issue and have the developer take a look and fix the problem.

There’s so much there!

While we’ve jumped deeply into the Atlassian Cloud, we have only just started to scratch the surface. There’s still so much more that we have yet to utilize. We’d love to hear from our fellow Atlassian Cloud users with ways that they’ve utilized this great set of tools.

A note on the pictures

While this is a totally serious blog post (we really do love Atlassian and can’t imagine how we’d operate without them), the pictures that we used are free stock images made by the cast of the new Vince Vaughn movie, Unfinished Business. Anyone who has searched for decent stock images knows how utterly ridiculous business stock images are. I had been thinking of writing this blog post for a while, and when I saw these images, I knew that I had the perfect stock photos to accompany it. Thanks Vince Vaughn and THANKS Atlassian!

Mobile Friendly Campus Map for PSU

The Campus Planning Office of Portland State University has engaged the Gartrell Group to design and build a mobile-friendly, web-based campus map that will showcase some of the Office’s excellent cartographic products. This interactive application is intended to support the wayfinding needs of prospective students and campus visitors and also to help community members quickly locate key resources (e.g. the “bike hub”,“Market Street Pub”, etc.).
It will also provide easy means for producing maps for re-use in campus publications and reference materials. The tool will be developed through the use of a responsive design framework to help assure a great user experience for people using mobile devices and desktop browsers alike. Our team is delighted to have the opportunity to help the University develop this new capability and we look forward to using it ourselves.

The map is due for production rollout this coming summer. More on this as we get further into the project…

Our location intelligence quarterly update

Is it already July?

Usually, by this time of year, things slow down a bit, as many organizations’ fiscal years have come to a close. But not this year. This year we continue to be busy well into the summer!

We have a lot going on;

  • Bryce and Tim just returned from Texas, where they met with a new client in the energy sector to discuss configuring our Performance Atlas to meet their needs. The requirements and refinement process will take up the next few weeks before we begin development. We’ll be sure to post more on that as the project proceeds.
  • we’re continuing to working with the City of Portland’s Public School Administration to develop a GIS platform in order to extend location intelligence across business lines, with the initial focus on mapping out safe walking and biking routes to each of their 64 elementary and middle schools. You can read about our adventures in testing, as well as our two part series on developing a GIS-based methodology for Safe Routes to School route finding. Part 1Part 2.
  • we’re wrapping up a consulting project with the folks at Hennepin County, Minnesota where we made use of the brand-new URISA GIS Maturity Capability Model,
  • our two-year project with Seattle City Light to provide Strategic planning and ongoing location intelligence support services is moving along nicely,
  • we’ve wrapped up Phase 1 of configuring our Performance Atlas web application to provide the Etisalat team with a hosted solution that will increase their location intelligence related to performance across sales, marketing and facility planning business lines. We anticipate work on Phase 2 will start up sometime this summer.
  • we’re kicking off a project with Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife to bring the popular hunting and shooting ranges map to mobile devices,
  • back in the Spring, we configured a web application to provide a client with a hosted location intelligence solution providing web access to college campus, floor-by-floor, viewing and updating of facility conditions and assets. We are now improving that application so that our client can make it available to colleges throughout the country.
  • and of course, we continue to provide hosting services to many happy clients!

Just because we have a lot going on doesn’t mean that we’re too busy to talk to you. If you are in need of some GIS consulting, or need a web application for your GIS data, or need a home for your GIS data – or just want to talk – please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re here!